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Comment by achow | Hacker News Reader

Repasting couple of comments from previous posts around Figma. They need to be repeated..

- Love Figma! However, their enterprise licence is $45/month ($540 annually)! That is ludicrous for the functionality that the app provides.

- Figma is a closed eco system. You cannot export the files and open them in other app for editing. Sketch is open, and Figma takes advantage of that - it imports and converts to Figma, but will not allow other way round. It is one way traffic with Figma.

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On first point: for the functionality that the app provides that's a pretty sweet deal. Many comparable tools will cost you more, some much more (looking at Framer/Adobe here). On second point: arguably you can do a lot of exporting and processing with their API. Yes, their file export format (*.fig) is not supported by anything else, but you can also fall back to SVG export for example.

45/month for an enterprise seems like nothing. How many editors could a company have? If every editor costs ~50k (I'm making this up, I suspect it's more), 540 annual is a blip.

Compare $45/month to $33/Month (Photoshop). Edited the price & feature info.

Photoshop has 20+ years of development behind it, tons of feature across different domains (UI, photography, animation to print production), cutting edge Visual Computing features.., plus 1TB cloud storage. https://www.adobe.com/plans-fragments/modals/business/modals...

The key word is $45/month for the functionality it provides.

[Disclaimer - NOT A fan of Adobe and trying to get away from the shackles of it.]

So you're comparing enterprise license of Figma with individual license for Photoshop? That's a tad unfair seeing as individual Figma license is free.

Thanks. Updated the enterprise price info for Photoshop ($33 vs for personal $25)

Figma and Photoshop are totally different in functionality. Comparing their prices is like comparing a ham sandwich to a 9 volt battery.

Cost of setting up and running (at profit) a Ham sandwich kitchen vs a 9v battery factory we are talking about.

It makes no sense to compare the prices without also comparing how their wildly different feature set applies to your needs.

Adobe's Figma equivalent is called "XD", as in Adobe XD. Photoshop isn't designed for interactive prototyping. Of course it's still used to develop high fidelity website mockups.

12 dollars a month is literally nothing to a company that is spending 10s or 100s of thousands on an editor. No one should think twice about that pricing.

I pay for stuff like this all the time at my relatively small (8 people) company. It is a blip on our burn chart, it all gets rolled up into a "doesn't matter" column because the cost of each license per engineer is less than a percent of their salary.

It's great to collaborate, but unless you're actively with a client/team demoing something, it's more of a distraction. For the money you'd spend on one month of Figma, you can get something like Affinity Designer and pocket the $495. And you'd get a native file to do with as you choose... in perpetuity.

The point is that a company is not going to care about pocketing 495 dollars, or even twice that, when they're spending 50k on a designer. They wouldn't even think twice.

If you're not with a team you don't need the enterprise license and can use everything for free.

Pricing should be decided by not whether one can pay but if it's worth it.

I'm paying Jetbrains full product package for just < $15/mo. Surely Figma isn't providing 3 times more productivity than all of their tools combined.

There's a difference between I can pay and I don't want to pay.

You're talking about a single user license. At a company it's a no brainer, the difference between 15 and 50 dollars is 0, it is de-facto "worth it".

Sketch can be as open at it wants, as long as it doesn't do Windows, it is worthless for our designers to give their stuff to the development teams, so XD and Figma it is.

Maybe someone will be helped to discover https://icons8.com/lunacy - a free graphics program for Windows which works with Sketch files and supports basic operations.

On your second point: yes, be careful. It feels a bit like a dirty tactic. To support the open philosophy of Sketch we keep buying Sketch updates, besides our Figma subscription. Long term stuff, that we need to preserve, we make in Sketch. One-offs we make in Figma.

At first I was assuming that the critique of $45/mo for the enterprise license was that it was too cheap, something I agree with! It's definitely not too much.

For large companies making dozens-to-hundreds of millions in revenue, $45/mo is a completely irrelevant rounding error. And the power of tightening the feedback loops that the article alludes to is worth far, far more than that.

Are the Figma files available through the Figma API what you are searching for? Though it only seems to enable read access and "interactions".

- [1] https://www.figma.com/developers/api#files

I am for paying for software. An application like Figma is way more complicated than you’re giving it credit for. Making all software free devalues the whole industry. It’s fair for them to take a piece of the revenue of the companies that they help.

>Making all software free devalues the whole industry.

That ship has sailed thanks to open source and app stores.

FWIW, Figma is only at #2 in https://alternativeshub.gitlab.io/web-design/software/figma/

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